Andrew

In the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Daily Show host Trevor Noah had one point to make on Thursday: It’s possible to be both pro-cop and pro-black.

"It always feels like in America, it’s like, if you take a stand for something, you automatically are against something else," Noah said. "You shouldn’t have to choose between the police and the citizens that they are sworn to protect."

Noah’s plea comes after what’s unfortunately become standard routine after these painful, lethal instances of police brutality: When some want accountability and acknowledgement that black lives matter, others hear it as an attack on police.

The segment also goes into the videos of both Sterling and Castile’s deaths and how people will be skeptical.

"You can’t deny the racism," Noah said.

At one point he bracingly compares the current responses to the reaction around Harambe, the gorilla that was killed earlier this summer when a child got into his enclosure. (It should be noted that the child is black, and there was a racist response directed at the child’s family.) In that instance, Noah believes, people — including law enforcement — empathized with the gorilla, and more action was taken to fix the systemic problems in that instance than there has been in the deaths of Sterling, Castile, and the black children, men, and women before them.

"We shouldn’t be afraid to say it: America has a problem within its police force," Noah said. "And although the problem disproportionately affects black people, it’s not just a black problem; it’s an American problem."

On the night Noah’s segment aired, at least 14 people were shot and five police officers were killed in Dallas.

In the early hours of Friday morning, police officers in Texas took what is thought to have been unprecedented action for US law enforcement. Using a bomb disposal robot, they killed the suspect in last night's shooting in Dallas after negotiations with the individual broke down. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters. "Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

Many experts believe this is the first time that a bomb disposal robot has been used in this way on US soil. Such robots are controlled remotely, and used for...

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Midway through The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) tries to find someone to complain to. Her boss, the indomitable and incomparable fashion editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), got stranded in Miami because of a hurricane and ended up missing her twins’ piano recital. It was Andy’s job to find a way for Miranda to get home, as Miranda reminds Andy before shooting her a searing glare.

Andy, her brown hair floating behind her like a worn-out blanket, finds Nigel (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s trusted art director. She begins to whine and cry, but he cuts her pity party short.

"You have no idea how many legends have walked these halls," he tells her, referring to the offices of the Vogue-esque Runway magazine where Miranda is editor in chief. "And what's worse, you don't care. Because this place, where so many people would die to work, you only deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn't kiss you on the forehead and give you a gold star on your homework at the end of the day."

Nigel’s tough-love pep talk unlocks the entire film.

The Devil Wears Prada, which turns 10 years old this week, does an admirable job of portraying the fashion industry and an even better one of nailing the demands of being an assistant at a fashion magazine. But what it does best, despite being set in the largely inaccessible world of luxury fashion, is tap into a very relatable fantasy of overachievement: sacrificing everything for your job, excelling in it, and earning your boss’s trust and respect.

The film’s greatest achievement is that it tells an important story about a woman who learns to do a challenging job — and do it well, and revel in the thrill of accomplishment — while being chastised by her passive-aggressive, unhelpful friends and the dolt from Entourage.

Andy and her friends are spoiled and entitled; the first part of The Devil Wears Prada makes this very clear. They’re laughing in New York City, confident that it’s only a matter of time before someone hands them the dream jobs they deserve.

When Andy is granted an interview at the Elias-Clark publishing company, she doesn’t even bother looking presentable or researching which magazines are part of its portfolio. She talks about pieces she wrote for her college newspaper that have no relation to the types of stories Runway publishes. She tells Miranda Priestly to her face that she’s never heard of the legendary editor, even though Miranda is extremely well-known even outside the fashion industry (just like Anna Wintour, on whom the character of Miranda is partially based). And then Andy has the gall to ask to be considered for the position.

Streep’s portrayal of Miranda, an amalgam of Vogue’s Wintour and the late British fashion editor Liz Tilberis, is, of course, what makes this movie spin. Streep makes Miranda’s approval and attention seductive. Her glamorous disappointment slices and singes.

This clash between privilege and expectations, between the puerile and the dignified, between the polished and the rough, yields what ultimately amounts to grade-A overachievement porn.

You root for Andy to get her act together, to start dressing the part. You get mad at her friends for taking her Marc Jacobs bags and Mason Pearson hairbrushes and then browbeating her for being late to their birthday parties. You want Andy to lean in and go to Paris, even though there’s only room for one assistant and it’s her co-worker Emily’s dream. (Emily Blunt, who plays Emily, is also fantastic in this film).

When Andy begins to understand and rise to the pressures of overachievement, Nigel’s speech begins to resonate.

It makes you appreciate the movie’s goofy opening credits, a montage of random women meticulously lining their eyes, painting on lipstick, and kissing their boyfriends goodbye in the morning. It explains that the women who work at Runway, the "clackers" (so named because of the sound their heels make when they hit the floor), don’t obsess over great clothes because they want to play dress-up, but rather because their jobs demand they look the part. It gives better insight into why Miranda operates the way she does. It also highlights what a fantastic idiot Andy has been.

And around 15 minutes after Andy finally starts trying, I stop watching.

I’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada at least 20 times since it was released (for two years, I lived with a pair of roommates who would rotate watching The Devil Wears Prada, Pitch Perfect, and Frozen every Sunday night) — and I just can’t bring myself to watch past the point where Nigel tells Andy about his new job as creative director for James Holt’s fashion company while they’re in Paris. What follows is a betrayal, a gooey self-realization, and Andy reverting to becoming a holier-than-thou figure.

The movie fails itself. Like its main character, it’s too earnest for its own good. It desperately wants to be a story about values and an uncompromising bottom line of self that we refuse to cross, even though it’s so much better when it’s not.

In the end, Andy caves and takes her friends’ advice. She decides they’re right and Miranda is wrong. That it’s incorrect to sacrifice herself for her job. That it’s incorrect to sacrifice her martyr of an Entourage boyfriend and his greasy curls for Miranda.

But I imagine an alternate ending, many sequels, and possibly a shared universe that involves Andy dumping her friends and somehow, years down the road, laughing with Miranda over a glass of rosé before eventually becoming the Devil herself.

Or I just restart the movie.

If you’re not in the habit of regularly backing up your data, do it now . Cloud storage company Backblaze has made it even easier with insanely cheap storage space that you can connect directly to your NAS and more.

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Audioshield is like Guitar Hero for your hands, and it’s making me want to own music again.

Virtual reality is still pretty much where it was a year ago — geeky, expensive and too hard to set up for most consumers. That will probably change, but until it does: Find a friend or coworker who has an HTC Vive and get them to show you Audioshield.

Audioshield works sort of like Guitar Hero, except played with your hands. You pick a song and have to “play” it by matching the beat of the song as its notes fly towards you.

Instead of tapping on a plastic instrument, however, you use the Vive’s included motion controllers to wield two virtual shields: One blue, one orange, held in your left and right hands, respectively; each blocks notes of its corresponding color, and bringing the two shields together creates a temporary wall to block purple notes.

Here’s a video of what all that looks like in action:

I’m one of those foolish geeks who went ahead and bought an HTC Vive and was not expecting to fall in love with what is essentially an interactive music visualizer (we’ve come so far since WinAmp!). But after more than 12 hours of play time, I’ve realized that Audioshield is a total delight and it’s changing the way I think about owning music.

For several years, I’ve gotten most of my music from radio and streaming services like SiriusXM, Amazon Prime Streaming, YouTube, Spotify and (the now-deceased) Songza. Now, thanks to Audioshield, I want to own music again so that I can load it into the game.

(That might not always be a requirement, of course. Audioshield already works with Soundcloud, so one day it might be able to talk to Spotify or Amazon.)

Unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band, which have carefully controlled libraries of music that are made to be played just so on their instruments, you have to take the good with the bad in Audioshield. Good: You can play any song, because the notes are automatically generated. Bad: The notes are automatically generated, so not every song feels quite right.

However, discovering which songs do and do not pass muster is part of the fun if you have the right attitude. The algorithm that determines which notes fly at you seems to get tripped up by the likes of Daft Punk, but does surprisingly well with most classical music and movie scores, a genre that you would never find in Guitar Hero.

Now all the old CDs I ripped to iTunes a decade or more ago, after years spent gathering digital dust, have taken on new life. It’s one thing to think you know a song because you’ve heard it a hundred times. Experiencing that same song as a form of shadow boxing is entirely different.

(My most embarrassing Audioshield experiment to date? That’s a toss-up between “Crank That” by Soulja Boy and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from the soundtrack to “Mulan.” Both fun!)

The other thing this game brings into relief is the physicality of virtual reality. If you play a fast enough song, especially on one of the harder difficulty settings, Audioshield can easily make you work up a sweat. Just search Twitter if you don’t believe me:

Gross. But 100 percent accurate.

In the wake of the UK’s "Brexit" vote to leave the European Union, thousands of people on social media began discussing "Texit": the idea that Texas might leave the United States. Obviously, this is not a serious movement — most of those tweets were jokes. But imagining a hypothetical Texit could be helpful for Americans confused by Brexit. Translating things into American terms might help make a decision that seems totally foreign more comprehensible.

So what follows is a brief description of a hypothetical "Texit," if it were to happen the same way and for the same reasons that Brexit did. The point is not to sketch something that could actually happen, but to understand what just happened in the UK by literally describing the events in an American context.

AUSTIN, Texas — Americans woke up in a state of complete shock on Friday morning, as Texas stunned the world by voting to leave the United States.

"I fought this campaign in the only way I know how, which is to say directly and passionately what I think and feel," Gov. Greg Abbott, the referendum’s leading opponent, said in a tearful resignation speech.

"But the Texan people have made a very clear decision to take a different path, and as such I think the country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction."

In some sense, this vote has been a long time coming. Texas has long maintained a separate identity from the rest of the United States, celebrating its past as an independent country with its own traditions and history. Despite being America’s second-largest economy, Texas remained culturally distinct from the rest of the Union.

Until today, however, the sense was that Texans cared more about the economic benefits of integration with the rest of the United States than it did about its sense of separate national identity.

Texas benefited hugely from free trade with other states, as well as from Americans moving from other states to come work in its relatively successful economy. Now, however, Texas has jeopardized all of that in the name of state identity and sovereignty.

The key trigger appears to have been immigration.

Over the past decades, Texas had experienced unprecedentedly large waves of immigration, particularly from poorer Mexicans looking for employment in Texas’s stronger economy. Many Texans felt that the Mexican migrants were stealing their jobs and diluting "traditional" Texan culture.

This fueled a massive backlash against immigrants. The once-minor Texas Independence Party, led (ironically) by former New York businessman Donald Trump, had gained significantly in statewide polls over the past decade.

The TIP’s real genius was tying anxiety about immigrants to traditional Texan skepticism of Washington. TIP members argued, pretty fairly, that American national policy prevented Texas from closing its borders. The TIP single-mindedly made the case that Texas needed to keep out the immigrants and regain its sovereign status, and that the only way to do that was to leave the United States.

The pressure from TIP terrified the Texas Republican Party and Abbott, who stood to lose votes to their new, more stridently right-wing rival. Therefore, in 2013, Abbott committed to holding a referendum on Texas independence if he won the 2015 statewide elections. His plan was that the vote would fail and TIP would be weakened as a result.

But things didn’t go as planned. For one thing, Abbott faced a split in his own party. About half of the Texas state GOP, led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, campaigned for leaving. Patrick appealed to Texas’s tradition of independence, arguing that "unaccountable" leaders like United States President Barack Obama were acting like petty authoritarians, without Texas’s interests at heart.

A spate of terrorist attacks elsewhere in the US made the Leave camp’s arguments against immigration far more persuasive.

Attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando convinced many Texans that Muslims migration increased the terrorist threat in the US. The Trump and Patrick factions argued that Washington’s policy of admitting thousands of Syrian refugees, and then allowing them to move freely around the States, put Texas at risk.

"There is an especial problem with some of the people who’ve come here and who are of the Muslim religion who don’t want to become part of our culture," Trump said in a recent speech. "People do see a fifth column living within our country, who hate us and want to kill us."

These sentiments — xenophobia, skepticism of Washington and Obama, and fears of terrorism — carried the day. Virtually all of rural Texas voted to leave, ultimately overwhelming pro-American sentiment in cities like Austin, the very liberal capital, as well as in heavily Latino areas.

Indeed, some of these areas are now discussing leaving Texas and forming an independent Tex-Mex that would make a bid to remain in the United States.

As for Texas itself, nobody knows what will happen. It seems like Patrick will take over as governor, and his first priority will be negotiating the terms of Texit with Washington.

Texas will want to maintain its free trade agreement and other privileges. However, Washington has a strong incentive to punish Texas. It wants to prevent other restive states, like Vermont, from following Texas’s lead, thus collapsing the entire Union.

Therefore, Washington might well deny trade and other privileges to Texas, a move that would inflict major pain on the Texan economy and force other states to leave.

One thing, however, is for sure: The United States will never be the same after Texas’s departure. We’ve truly entered unknown territory.

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The howl of despair with which global financial markets greeted the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union has nothing on the disappointment and anger of the 48 percent of British voters, many of them young, who wanted to stay.

Until the final days before the referendum, much of the coverage outside of the UK discussed the "Brexit" in economic terms. But particularly for young people in the UK, deciding whether to leave the European Union was a bigger question of national identity, with the "Leave" campaign representing a rejection of immigrants and foreigners and the "Remain" campaign representing a hopeful cosmopolitanism.

Young people told pollsters that they were heavily in favor of remaining, while their elders wanted to leave. And losing is both economically and emotionally devastating. This comment from "Nicholas," a reader of the Financial Times, explains why:

A quick note on the first three tragedies. Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded, and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another.

Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors.

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said, ‘The British people are sick of experts,’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?

The quote is going viral on Twitter, perhaps because, more than a chart of falling stock prices, it shows the impact of leaving on those who believed that Britain was better off as a part of Europe, and the way in which the country’s young voters, who overwhelmingly supported remaining, feel they will pay for the decisions of their elders.

I am all for a world of brand mashups. Taco Bell's Doritos Loco Tacos had me racing to the drive-thru opening week, and the Sour Patch Kids-flavored Slurpee at 7-11 is...not my favorite, but I just like knowing that it exists.

For the latest edible remix, Burger King has tunneled deep into the American psyche and excavated something the people didn't even know they wanted: Cheetos powder-dusted mozzarella sticks filled with deep-fried macaroni and cheese.

Just $2.49 will get you a 5-piece order of these coagulated orange clumps of processed cheese, and they come with ranch dressing dipping sauce because The Burger King knows taste. It's only available in select Burger Kings in Southern California for now, but if we all work together,...

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What is your stance on Mac N' Cheetos??

Thursday's new of a $50 million heist of digital currency at Ethereum. was followed today be reports of a second heist from the DAO, according to the Bitcoin News Service -- this one for just 22 Ether. "It appears this is just someone who wanted to test the exploit and see if they could use it to their advantage... " Slashdot reader Patrick O'Neill writes: The currency's community is currently debating a course forward for a currency who is built on the idea that it is governed by software and not human beings. One option is to fork the code, another is to do absolutely nothing at all." Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, posted Sunday that "Over the last day with the community's help we have crowdsourced a list of all of the major bugs with smart contracts on Ethereum so far, including both the DAO as well as various smaller 100-10000 ETH thefts and losses in games and token contracts." The list begins by including "The DAO (obviously)," but is followed by a warning that "progress in smart contract safety is necessarily going to be layered, incremental, and necessarily dependent on defense-in-depth. There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything." The Daily Dot wrote Friday that "Because of the way the code in question is written, Etherum's developers and community have 27 days to decide what to do before the hackers are able to move the money and cash out... What's happening now amounts to a political campaign. But the debate is far from over. The clock is ticking now, the world is watching, and the next step of the cryptocurrency experiment is unfolding under a spotlight burning hotter every day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader JImbob0i0 shares a scathing article by Red Hat's Fedora QA "community monkey"/senior QA engineer on Canonical's announcement about their application delivery mechanism "snap"... ...and how it's going to unite all distributions and kill apt and rpm! This is, to put it diplomatically, a heaping pile of steaming bullshit... The press release and the stories together give you the strong impression that this thing called Snappy is going to be the cross-distribution future of application delivery, and it's all ready for use today and lots of major distributions are buying into it... The stories have headlines like "Adios apt and yum? Ubuntu's snap apps are coming to distros everywhere" and "Snap Packages Become Universal Binary Format for All GNU/Linux Distributions"... Now, does Snappy actually have the cross-distribution buy-in that the press release claims (but never outright states) that it has? No... The sum total of communication between Canonical and Fedora before the release of this press release was that they mailed us asking about the process of packaging snappy for Fedora, and we told them about the main packaging process and COPR. They certainly did not in any way inform Fedora that they were going to send out a press release strongly implying that Fedora, along with every other distro in the world, was now a happy traveler on the Snappy bandwagon... They just decided to send out a wildly misleading press release and actively encourage the specialist press to report that Snappy was all set to take over the world and everyone was super happy with that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to a Maine trucking lawsuit, the Oxford comma is back in the news.

The controversy? As the New York Times explains, a recent overtime lawsuit hinged on the interpretation of a state law — and whether it should be read as if it had an Oxford comma or not. Of course, including a comma would have made that clear from the beginning.

It's the latest volley in one of those timeless internet arguments. But as the above video shows, the Oxford comma’s usage isn’t the most interesting part about it. The punctuation’s history is more interesting than an Oxford invention — as Jasso Lamberg explained in his 2015 post on the subject, it’s likely that credit for the Oxford comma can be traced back to Herbert Spencer, a classic Victorian generalist who popularized the phrase "survival of the fittest." (If you want to know more about Spencer, the Stanford Encyclopedia provides a typically excellent look at his philosophy and reputation.)

Though Spencer may have disappeared from the popular discourse, his comma has lived on. So next time you argue commas with friends, share a little history about it too. The Oxford comma has been fit enough to survive this long — even if Spencer himself has faded into the history books.

A man whose daughter was killed in the November terrorist attacks in Paris has filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google for providing "material support" to ISIS. Reynaldo Gonzalez filed the suit in a California federal court on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports, alleging that the companies "knowingly" allowed ISIS to raise money, spread propaganda, and recruit militants on their platforms.

The lawsuit is very similar to a civil suit filed against Twitter in January. That lawsuit was filed by a woman whose husband was killed during a terrorist attack in Amman, Jordan, and Gonzalez's suit includes identical screenshots and passages. Gonzalez's 23-year-old daughter, Nohemi, was among the 130 people who were killed in c...

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An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Ubuntu's "snappy" new way of packaging applications is no longer exclusive to Ubuntu. Canonical today is announcing that snapd, the tool that allows snap packages to be installed on Ubuntu, has been ported to other Linux distributions including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo among others. To install snap packages on non-Ubuntu distributions, Linux desktop and server users will have to first install the newly cross-platform snapd. This daemon verifies the integrity of snap packages, confines them into their own restricted space, and acts as a launcher. Instructions for creating snaps and installing snapd on a variety of distributions are available at this website. Snaps can exist on the same system as either deb or RPM packages. Snaps aren't the only new package manager for Linux distributions that aims to simplify installation of applications. There's also AppImage and OrbitalApps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mi writes from a report via news9.com KWTV: KWTV writes, "You may have heard of civil asset forfeiture. That's where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime. Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money." But do not worry: "If you can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past," said Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: A user on Reddit forum who goes by the alias FiletOfFish1066 (referred to as Mr. Fish hereafter) has been let go by his company after it was discovered that Mr. Fish hadn't actually done anything for six years. Umm, well he did something, but nothing new and productive, his Bay Area-based firm says, which paid him $95,000 (avg) each of these years. When he first got his software testing quality assurance job, he spent eight months automating all of the programming tasks. With all of his tasks fully automated by a computer, he was able to literally sit back and do whatever he wanted. Mr. Fish is pretty despondent in tone after he posted about getting fired from his job. He's upset because he has completely forgotten how to code, having relegated all that work to the computer, and now possesses no marketable skills. But, he also is not stressed financially, having saved up $200,000 during his 6-year long "career."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you’re of a certain age, chances are you loved your Saturday morning cartoons. They were something akin to event television — that one block of shows like Beast Wars or Pepper Ann that you looked forward to every week. For a lot of us, that might have included watching Voltron.

Then the Saturday morning cartoon blocks of yore died. Jettisoned from network TV in 2014, kids’ shows are now in a kind of televisual diaspora. It’s into this new TV landscape that Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender makes its debut. What’s amazing, though, is that Netflix has created a show in Voltron that captures the feeling of watching those old Saturday morning cartoons. It’s certainly bingeworthy TV, but if you slow down and resist the urge to watch...

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In March, ex-Stanford student athlete Brock Allen Turner was convicted of three felony counts: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object. Last week he was sentenced to six months in jail.

The crime and lenient sentence has raised the ire of pundits and legal experts, who point to the uneven dispensation of justice for the privileged. Virginia Commonwealth student Ellie Fialk brings up another point in a message to The Washington Post:

Use his mugshot. He is a criminal. I didn’t ask for his pristine Stanford yearbook photograph or his ‘All-American Swimmer’ smile. This man is a rapist.

Indeed many news outlets reporting on the story have used Turner’s photo from Stanford University to seemingly reinforce the narrative of the All-American swimmer. California Public Records Act (CPRA) doesn’t specify whether booking photos must be made available and a search for Turner’s booking photos comes up empty on Google Images and many infamous mugshot photo services.

In stark contrast to Turner’s smiling, “baby-faced” photo are the images used by The Washington Post for stories of other convicted rapists. I searched for “rapist” and pulled the images from the first four stories that concerned specific individuals. All four stories used either booking photos or photojournalistic photos to illustrate the stories – not what is ostensibly a PR handout photo.

The situation with Turner is vaguely reminiscent of Canon’s experiment to photograph the same man with six photographers – each of whom were told a different profession/disposition for the subject. The resulting photos had stereotypical characteristics.

Similarly, shortly after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag emerged as a pointed criticism of the media in its portrayal of black youth.

Whether intentional or not, the use of Turner’s school portrait raises the spectre of class and/or racial bias. Photo usage guidelines can and should be developed to ensure even treatment of subjects. And making these visual guidelines public will increase transparency between news organizations and their readers.

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About the author: Allen Murabayashi is the Chairman and co-founder of PhotoShelter, which regularly publishes resources for photographers. Allen is a graduate of Yale University, and flosses daily. This article was also published here.

Developer Nick Lee has earned himself a reputation for putting weird and wacky operating systems on Apple gadgets, including Windows 95 on an Apple Watch. Now, he's gone the practical route of bringing a full-fledged version of Android to the iPhone. There's just one catch: you need a special, 3D-printed smartphone case to make it work.

Lee figured out how to clone the Android Open Source Project (ASOP) and make a custom version of Android Marshmallow he could run on a board he bought himself. He then 3D printed an iPhone-sized enclosure he found on Thingiverse, and combined the board, a battery, a boost converter, and resistor to make a lightweight case. At first, it was quite bulky, resembling a brick you'd be more likely to have have...

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You're a smart person. You know that building your own PC is the Wise Choice. You upgrade your system piece by piece, looking for value and performance. You'd never spend over $3,000 for a monolithic all-in-one PC. Sure, the 3440 x 1440, 34-inch curved screen Digital Storm put on this Aura all-in-one sounds nice now, but someone will be selling standalones in three packs at Costco for $50 in a few years, so it's best to hold off. Sure, it's cool having a top-of-the-line graphics card, but not if it's within melting distance of a 34-inch LCD panel, with a desk-level exhaust fan keeping your fingers toasty all summer. You'll do the right thing. I'll do the right thing. We'll both be okay.

Oh boy, do I want one of these computers.

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Maternity photos are often idealized, showing radiant mothers-to-be cradling their bellies in serene environments and ethereal light. Lifestyle photographer Danielle Guenther decided to shed some light on the other end of the spectrum: her new project, “What the Bump,” is a look at the not-so-glamorous side of pregnancy.

Guenther is known for her viral photo series “Best Case Scenario” photo series, which shows the chaos of being a parent of young children. Her new work is a spin-off from that project.

The photo above is titled “OverDO,” and shows how mothers how mothers try different tactics to hasten labor when they get past their due date. Interestingly enough, the subject of the photo went into labor just 8 hours after the photo was captured. (“It worked!,” Guenther says).

Here are the rest of the photos in the series so far:

“I’m Not Walking Home”

“Nesters Anonymous”

“It’s Go Time”

“Calling For Backup”

“Morning Sickness, 9-5”

“Priorities”

You can find more of Guenther’s work on her website, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Image credits: Photographs by Danielle Guenther and used with permission

Hamza Shaban, writing for BuzzFeed:

Google’s “smart” replies and virtual assistant improve with use, “learning” by analyzing conversations and context. But this kind of fine-tuned processing requires a record or “memory” of chats that take place in the normal settings. Similar to Google’s web browser, Chrome, which includes its own incognito mode, the normal settings offer a more intuitive experience to consumers, Google said. The option to turn on incognito mode in Allo and enable end-to-end encryption offers additional security, but with the choice to revert back to the fuller version, Google added.

But others are concerned with the broader ramifications of Allo’s design. “Google has given the FBI exactly what the agency has been calling for,” Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU’s principal technologist, told BuzzFeed News.

A live Google bot inside a chat stream is an interesting feature, and it can’t be done with end-to-end encryption. But this means law enforcement can require Google to hand over transcripts, and effectively wiretap your “normal” Allo chats. That’s a tradeoff many people will be willing to make. My beef is with using the words “normal” and “incognito”. Perhaps I’m spoiled by iMessage, but to me a “normal” chat is one with end-to-end encryption and no AI bot. Allo’s “normal” chats are the ones that are abnormal.

And “incognito” is absolutely the wrong word for Allo’s private chats. The word incognito means “having one’s true identity concealed”. That’s not what happens with Allo’s private chats. You’re still identified by your phone number. They should call this “private”, not “incognito”.

Except for TVs.

The company that prides itself on customer centricity may have just alienated some customers.

Amazon has been known to give refunds if the price of an item drops after a purchase and the customer notifies customer service. But it appears that Amazon stopped providing these refunds earlier this month, except for televisions, according to price-tracking companies and customer postings on Reddit.

The move may have something to do with the rise of startups that track prices for Amazon customers and automatically request refunds when appropriate. One of them, a Santa Monica-based startup called Earny that is backed by the startup incubator Science, first pointed out the change to Recode.

Earny scours a customer's email inbox for digital receipts, and then continuously checks the price on a retailer's website to see if it drops. Brooklyn-based Paribus, another price-drop tool, also noticed the recent change.

Amazon spokeswoman Julie Law told Recode the policy was always limited to televisions and that any customer who has received refunds on other products was granted an "exception." But it's clear that those exceptions were previously given out freely, and now they are not.

It's also clear that startups like Earny and Paribus, which require users to hand over their Amazon account credentials, are on Amazon's radar.

"[W]e take customer security very seriously and want to remind them not to share their Amazon account credentials with anyone," Law said.

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Target's Chief Digital Officer on Competing in the Online Marketplace

A year ago, when Google began to unwind Google+, it felt like a positive sign for the company’s underperforming social efforts. After sinking years into building a product overstuffed with photos, communication tools, link-sharing, and discussions, Google began to shrink them into more manageable tools. The results were largely positive. Google Photos has become a monster with 200 million monthly users, the company said during its I/O keynote. And communities evolved into a more modern take on message boards, emerging last week as a new mobile app called Spaces.

But when it comes to the killer app of the mobile era — messaging — Google’s efforts aren’t shrinking at all. Instead they’re multiplying into a dizzying array of disconnected...

Continue reading…

Trying to understand how healthy your food is by reading the nutrition labels on packaging is like trying to complete an advanced math equation: It's possible, but requires a lot of effort.

Now, deciphering the labels will finally get easier. The US Food and Drug Administration just announced their final ruling on a long-anticipated overhaul of calorie labels on packaged foods.

The new Nutrition Facts labels will appear on millions of food packages within two years, finally telling you more about what you really need to know about your food for health — especially how much sugar has been added.

FDA

There are five key changes to look out for:

• The calories in a serving and the serving size will be presented in bigger and bolder text.
• The amount of added sugars per serving will also be reported for the first time. Labels will also show how much that accounts for the daily value of sugar a person should be eating, as they have for carbohydrates, fats, and sodium for years.
• Serving sizes will better reflect the amount of food people eat instead of telling you how much energy you get out of half a granola bar or three-fourths of a cup of yogurt.
• Vitamin D, iron, calcium, and potassium will now be added to labels (because Americans aren't consuming enough) but reporting the values of vitamins A and C will no longer be required (these deficiencies are now rare).
• Instead of showing "calories from fat," the label will now include "total fat" and sub-types like "saturated fat" and "trans fat."  This reflects the research that certain types of fat are more harmful to health than others.

The most controversial news about the new calorie labels has to do with sugar

First Lady Michelle Obama on May 18 announcing the new nutrition labels in Washington DC.

That biggest news is the sugar update. Until now, there's been no way to tell how much added sugar lurks in your food. On the current calorie label (below), food companies only report "sugars" — which obscured the amount of sweeteners like sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, malt sugar, molasses, and others that food companies pump into their products to make them tastier.

For example, in chocolate milk and canned peaches, it was impossible to know how much sugar was naturally occurring (and generally healthy) and how much was added in to boost the taste.

FDA

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) the average American is now consuming 23 teaspoons of added sugar each day. These sweeteners are hidden in everything from the tea you drink to the yogurt you eat and the peanut butter you buy.

Too much added sugar in the diet is associated with increased risk of tooth decay, weight gain, heart disease, and poor nutrition. That's why the latest US Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that added sugars make up no more than 10 percent of a person's daily calories.

The reason it's taken so long to give Americans this information: fierce lobbying from the food industry since the new label design was first proposed in 2014 after a years-long push by the Obama administration. "The Sugar Association and Grocery Manufacturers Association have opposed the added sugars line," said Michael F. Jacobson, the president of CSPI, which has also advocated for added sugar reporting on labels since 1999.

For now, however, the sugar lobby lost.

"Having the added sugars will shock people into realizing how much sugar they're eating," Jacobson said. It's also expected to encourage companies to reformulate products to make them healthier.

The new label is a "huge win," added Marion Nestle, a food politics expert at New York University. "While Congress is nitpicking school food and child feeding programs, we will at least have added sugars on food labels. In today’s hideous political climate, this is cause for celebration."

But the labels aren't perfect…

In a perfect world, the food label would be communicated in an even clearer manner. For example, the CSPI asked that the FDA show the amount of added sugar in foods in terms of teaspoons as well as grams.

"People understand teaspoons so much more intuitively than grams," Jacobson said. But that's not happening for the same reason it took so long to reveal how much sugar is added to food: food industry pushback.

The Sugar Association, which represents most sugar producers, has already suggested it could sue the FDA about the new label.

Jacobson expects a lawsuit won't go very far since courts typically give deference to federal agencies.

But there's still time for political and legal wrangling. Most food companies won't be required to use the new label until July 26, 2018. Companies with less than $10 million in annual food sales will have an additional year to comply.

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Watch: Mark Bittman explains what's wrong with food in America

What’s your deepest… darkest photography secret? Do you occasionally give in and shoot *shudder* Auto? Is your most popular photo taken with *shudder* an iPhone? This silly DRTV video is all about these kinds of “shocking” photographer confessions.

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Warning: The ‘confession’ starting at 3:55 may be considered inappropriate by some (or many). Proceed at your own risk.

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Over the top (as usual), the best part of this video is actually the confessions it has inspired over on Reddit and in the YouTube comments. Scroll down to watch the video for yourself, and then keep scrolling to read some of our favorite photographer confessions posted so far:

I…I….I…sometimes prefer IG filters to anything I can do in lightroom/photoshop.
– planetb00m, Reddit

I…I *cannot maintain eye contact* I, sometimes use Auto tone in Lightroom *falls to the floor trembling*.
– PrymLens, Reddit

Last week… *Wipes tear* Last week I used part of my student loan check to fund a Tamron 15-30 2.8….. To go with my D750 from last years check.
– Tridawgn, Reddit

I still take photos with the kit lens… and I like it.
– Lex Arias, YouTube

I bought a Battery Grip just so my camera looked more professional.
– darwis lim, YouTube

I always shoot with a lens hood regardless if I need it or not because it looks cool on the camera.
– w33b3l, YouTube

And… of course… the confession we can probably all relate to:

I…I buy all this expensive camera equipment but barely use it…
– Cloudyyyy, Reddit

What’s your photographer confession? Let us know in the comments down below.